


selfish parting gift

by princerai



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canon Rewrite, Established Relationship, Eye Trauma, Fix-It of Sorts, Infinity War spoilers, M/M, Sibling Incest, Soul Bond, canon character death, handwavey magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 07:47:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14637324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princerai/pseuds/princerai
Summary: “So like, heterochromia. They got that on — that place? Don’t wanna just say the name and get it wrong, all I can remember right now is the ass part, sorry.”“No. I— this isn’t mine. The left eye.”“Not ... yours. Alright. That’s weird and demands a more thorough explanation.”-Thor is given a very strange gift on a very strange day in his life. He doesn't know what it's for.





	selfish parting gift

**Author's Note:**

> Last warning for IW spoilers scattered throughout. 
> 
> This is based on a theory that appeared before Infinity War was released, where people believed Loki might give his eye to Thor since he inexplicably seemed to have both eyes again in some promo material.
> 
> ...I've got a thing about eyes; it means a lot to me, the whole 'Thor losing an eye' thing, as someone who is partially blind. I'm not kidding about the eye trauma tag, I kind of went wild with it. 
> 
> Also I love Rocket being Thor's keeper. I want to write him always.

Loki crumples to the ground, and Thor cannot be there to catch him. 

Thanos is gone in a merciless flash, has left them both to die a fiery death together. He has taken everything from them in a single swoop of his great fist— and Thor wonders what good it is to be a god if he could not prevent this. 

Through the cacophony of his ship crumbling to pieces, the last vestiges of what he once called home burning down around him, he hears it: a faint wheeze, gurgling through a barrier of blood and bone. 

Thor tears through steel as though it is paper, no longer magically bound to his body. Shattered bones rock beneath his skin; he breaks apart from within, and still claws towards his brother. 

He wouldn’t let him die alone. 

(And he knew he was dying, he knew, his traitorous heart swells at the sight of Loki’s open and roving eyes but how could he fix this, what good is he, what sort of brother is he, what sort of _lover_ —)

“I’ve got you,” he says, and it’s a reassurance to both himself and to Loki, that neither of them are alone, they have one another, it’s okay, it’ll be okay, they’ll be in Valhalla together with their mother, their father, all of their people and he doesn’t know when he began to speak all this aloud but he must have— he gags upon copper, and blood spills upon his brother’s chest. 

For whatever reason, that draws a smile to his brother’s lips. 

Thor wants to kiss that smile one more time, and he tries— and would have, if not for the hand splayed over his chest then. 

Loki takes that hand, and lifts it, slowly, to his own face. His blue lips tremble, rasping for breath, and his fingers settle over his eyelid. 

“Loki, what—“

He doesn’t give him the chance to ask. His fingers glide past flesh, ghostly, gleaming bright with emerald green seidr, and—

His eye— it—

Thor’s stomach turns. His brother’s eyelid collapses, nothing to hold it up. 

Loki holds up his open palm, the round form of his freed eye rolling along the pale hills of his hand, white stained red. 

Cold, Thor’s cheek is _cold_ , and he knows then that Loki has cast away his eyepatch, leaving the gaping hole open. Some distant creature that has seized his ability to think puts two and two together for him, and yet, Thor still flinches away when Loki pushes his eye toward his face. 

The hand Loki uses to grip his chin and hold him in place is disarmingly strong. 

It’s the most sickening sensation, the slide of something still warm and alive sliding into his face, but it’s what Loki wants, and so Thor takes it. 

His vision doubles when he blinks— and he sees his brother twice, his blue smile stretching. 

Blood trickles down his cheek, rolling into the valley of his ruined throat. 

Then he isn’t smiling anymore. 

Thor drops his head onto his heart, his still heart. 

The ship burns. 

Thor does not. 

X

The Rabbit doesn’t do well in silences. Or the silence Thor provides, anyway. 

He understands. The silence he wears now as a cloak speaks of a thousand year burden that a mortal could never hope to comprehend. 

“So like, heterochromia. They got that on — that place? Don’t wanna just say the name and get it wrong, all I can remember right now is the ass part, sorry.”

Coming from a human, Thor might have taken offense. From his new friend, blunt of the tongue and quick to roll his beady black eyes— it’s familiar, Thor supposes, so it’s easy to forgive him his crudeness. 

“No. I— this isn’t mine. The green eye.”

Thor watches Rocket’s little paws tighten their grip upon the ship’s steering gears. 

“Not ... yours. Alright. That’s weird and demands a more thorough explanation.”

It’s fresh. Still raw and bloody. 

But he has had his heart torn from his chest already and lain spread before a cluster of strangers— gracious strangers that took him upon their ship in his time of need, but he would not have shared his pain with them so soon if he could have had his way. 

What’s another piece of his soul rendered bare, then, he supposes. 

“My brother. He gave it to me with his dying breath.”

The pregnant pause that follows holds about a thousand questions. Thor doesn’t have the strength to answer any of them but knows he must now. 

“I— alright. The brother you’ve been talking about, then, right?”

Thor nods. He doesn’t trust himself to speak just then. 

“That’s not the sort of parting gift I’d really— mm, maybe, depending on the circumstances, like what the eye can do, I might want it, but,” Rocket waves off his rambling. “Okay. Why would he do that? I’m assuming he just got all up in there and plucked it out and ... did he rip out yours too or—“

“Oh, no, our sister took my original eye. Loki placed his in the empty space where it once was.”

Again, a pause, and this time Rocket makes a point of throwing his paws in the air and raking his claws through his fur. 

“Jesus. Y’all got something with eyes, huh.”

For whatever reason, Thor finds that he’s smiling. 

“Suppose so.”

“Okay, cool, you guys have an eye fetish. We all got our fetishes. That’s fine,” Rocket carries on, casting a glance over to Groot to be sure the odd little tree boy is asleep after speaking so frankly. “So the eye is just his straight up eye. Nothing special. Just the world’s most personal gift.”

Thor touches his cheek, beneath where Loki’s eye now sits within his face. He blinks, sees, sees as he once did, with depth— and nothing special, as Rocket said. 

“Yes. I would say so.”

“Well. Whatever. Everybody’s got some weird shit. I guess Assplace has the eye thing. No less wild than burying rotting bodies beneath the dirt and crying over them, right?” 

Rocket leaps down from the navigator’s seat, and crosses to the back of the ship, grumbling about needing a bite to eat, keep an eye out for space garbage. Thor nods after him and settles into the silence with relief. 

He catches his reflection, sees the dozens of lines beneath his sleepless eyes, filled in with dirt and dried blood. 

The urge overcomes him, just to try, maybe...

He covers his eye. His blue one. 

And— Nothing. It’s just the ship. Just space. Stars trickling by at their steady uncaring pace. Groot, snoring gently from his seat, his game buzzing from its precarious perch upon his lap. 

Thor reaches out to right it, knowing he’d hate to wake and discover it broken— and jumps away, sits ramrod straight in his seat. 

Lightning swirls around his wrist in swathes, fit to bring down this ship, and— and it vanishes without fanfare when he opens both eyes and is presented with his bare wrist. 

Thor tests it, blinking one eye, then the other. Lightning, no lightning, lightning, no lightning...

“What’ve you done to me,” Thor murmurs to his unhearing brother. 

The blue glowing bolt crawls up his arm, hugging tight to his skin. 

It’s cold in a way it never has been, yet — soothing, ice upon a bruise. 

X

Hour by hour, Thor comes to see more than the lightning that rumbles free of his bones.

“I am Groot.”

The little tree asks him why he stares, and at first, Thor shrugs it off, says he was spacing out, but Groot must find the excuse flimsy as he keeps glancing up at Thor with a wary eye. 

Yellow tiny suns float above the little one’s head, casting a soft light over his face and reflecting off of the dusty game device’s screen. 

Thor tests it again; one eye closed, then the other. Nothing, then suns, then nothing again. 

He reaches to catch one, and watches it dissipate into golden dust beneath his touch. 

“You look like you’re battin’ at flies. Did you bring flying termites in here again, Groot?”

The child actually tears his eyes away from the game to express his outrage, displaying blunt wooden teeth at his fuzzy father figure. 

“I am Groot!” 

Thor shrinks away, babbling. “No, no, I thought I, uh, the eye, depth perception, I was trying to grab the seat, and—“

“No, no, don’t make excuses for him, he knows better by now. C’mon, let’s get you washed, I keep a little bottle of the stuff on me ever since the third time he brought an infestation on...”

Groot snarls his protest the whole way to the back of the ship. Thor sends him off with a sheepish smile and an apologetic wave.

Between himself, embraced by electric bolts as one would wear a blanket about their shoulders, and Groot’s flickering suns, Thor has an inkling of what it is that he’s seeing— and he comes to be sure of that upon Nidavellir. 

It isn’t like his lightning, lively and bright, nor like his friend’s power glittering overhead. 

He thinks of fire, scorching the walls of this forge, licking away til its black mark is made. His brother’s eye does not see power here, but power that once was. 

Thor now sees power, pure and simple energy in its existence, drifting unseen by mortal or inexperienced eyes. 

(Loki would know what to look for.)

(“Why?” Thor asks, again, and still, he is no closer to an answer, and all the same— he finds he is grateful to have even this piece of his brother with him, though he may not understand why he possesses it.)

(He closes both eyes against the relentless assault of the sun, and he is puzzled to find that they both produce tears, twin wet tracks down the burning soot smeared upon his face.)

X

Black clouds swirl over Wakanda, mindless, broken only by the wicked crack of thunder that Thor carries with his touchdown upon the earth. 

He knows he is the only one that can see them.

They dissipate, cut to ribbons by Stormbreaker’s cleaving head, and by the hands of his friends. In their place he calls down his own storm-clouds, cleansing the space that these demons dared to taint with their thirst for blood. 

Their power is nothing in comparison to the cloud that descends upon them all in due time- it would eat even his own clouds, violet swirls threatening to sweep away his own heavy gray storm. Much like the beginnings of a tornado, the violet poison stretches toward the earth, sucking at the air, leaving even Thor himself stopping midflight to gasp and stare.

He knows then what has come, and he _dives_.

Thanos stands far too proud for someone who is about to die by Thor’s hand. He imagines Stormbreaker at his throat- (like his brother cut off the air leave him drowning) or right to the heart, imagines blood pouring from his great chest and giving back to the earth, finally, after taking life for so, so long, he gives _something_ -

(Til he sees the violet twister, stretching from Thanos’s golden hand.)

(The stones.)

(Thoughts of revenge leave him, and his aim is true.)

A single flash, a swing of Stormbreaker, and the violet twister shrieks out a final dying cry. 

Its wicked grasp upon the air falters and breaks, and Thor can breathe easy at last. Only his clouds remain. 

Thanos falls to his knees under the eyes of Thor’s victorious storm. Rain pelts down, washing away the wild bloody bursts from his skull, feeding it to the soil below.

He might mistake the tears on his face for that rain, were it not only coming from his brother’s eye.

X

For weeks Thor wanders Wakanda.

Though he does not impose himself upon anybody’s good hospitality, he always finds himself in the bed of the nearest home by morning’s hazy break- or if they cannot carry him, a blanket of mysterious origin will have appeared around his shoulders, pillowing his neck from whatever brick wall or tree trunk he has settled against. He has quite the growing collection of silken Wakandan blankets now; he gives most back but keeps one, a long red sheet that catches the wind perfectly.

He is called a hero, and he bows his head every time, conjures up a smile, ever gracious.

Such praise would mean little to him before; he was only doing the right thing, was he not? It felt good, yes, and he was happy to call himself a hero, once upon a time.

Now it feels- 

Childish? Hollow?

(How can he be a hero when the one he wants to save now is unreachable, when he has failed them in the most ultimate fashion?)

Thor wanders, and wanders, and wanders.

He sees much magic. It is his constant companion. The cold touch of his lightning wreathes itself around his neck and waist like a lover when he lays himself down at night in the soft grass, exhausted beyond dreams.

Then the day comes, no rhyme or reason, that he should open his mismatched eyes to see a great winding light stretching into the heavens from the distant woods. 

It isn’t simple curiosity that sets him off at a breakneck speed- 

(His eye, his brother’s eye _burns_ -)

And he finds nothing.

He stands in a clearing, quiet, bare, save for a single tree stump set in the middle, rotting away beneath the burden of age. Mushrooms eat at its base, sapping up what life it has left to give. Dewy sun pours in through the branches, where he would expect to see the powerful white light and … it is nothing, nothing but pale blue sky and bare branches.

Despite the apparent nothingness before him- Thor stays.

He stays for days, right there, plucking grass blades from the earth, tearing them to shreds. Birds come to sit with him, pecking closer and closer. One morning he wakes to see a sparrow nibbling at a loose thread on his tunic. He lets her take it, watches her weave it into her nest from the branches overhead. 

The longer Thor remains, the taller the mushrooms grow, and the leaves are ever thicker, ever greener.

“So this is just you now, yeah? This your life?”

Rocket is the first to find him. He makes a good show of pretending he wasn’t worried. Thor resists the urge to pat his head when he sits cross-legged at his side.

“For now. How long have you all been searching for me?”

“Ah, ‘bout a day. We asked around, thought you mighta shacked up with someone, ‘til we were gettin’ blank stares and all when we asked about you.” Rocket sniffs at the air, catching a kernel of pollen on his nose and sneezing immediately. “Asgardian thing or Thor thing? This whole uh, thing, here.”

“Thor thing, I would guess.”

(It feels more like a Loki thing.)

“Tell my friends not to worry. And you as well,” Thor advises, when he sends Rocket away with the gentlest pat upon the back. 

He can’t hide a smile hearing the raccoon grumble to himself about being the complete and totla opposite of worried.

His friends do come by, one by one, just to check on him. He spares smiles for every one of them, knows it’s from the kindness of their hearts, and yet Thor has to swallow a sense of irritability at their presence, like they’re stepping on his sacred ground.

What’s sacred about it is yet to be determined. He sits here for days and is no closer to the answer- but he is drawn here, he cannot leave, no matter what.

“Is it a housing thing? Because I’ve got no problem housing you. Never have before. That hasn’t changed.”

Stark is the worst for it, though it would be a lie if Thor said he hadn’t missed him.

“I do not want a house, Tony,” Thor says simply. He eyes the grass crumpling beneath the iron suit’s boots, blackened by the embers emitting from the soles. “I want to be left alone.”

“Yeah, see, that’s the issue. The world almost ended and your world … straight up actually did end,” Stark cuts to the quick, as he always has. “So you understand why we might be a little worried about the whole ‘brooding in solitude in strange forests’ type behavior.”

“I feel that I am here because there is business to attend to. Business I must handle alone.”

The lines upon Tony’s face soften from beneath the lifted helmet. He searches for his next words carefully, gaze cast to the grass below. 

“...god business, then,” Tony said at last, the words bearing a finality, acceptance. 

Thor grants him a grateful smile. 

“God business.”

Tony took that, and he left Thor be; he must take it upon himself to chase the rest of their friends away, because nobody else comes to visit Thor after that. 

He waits, and waits, and waits, watching the place where the branches go bare, where the sunlight pours in and grows brighter every passing hour, and in turn, his heart is ever hotter, ever heavier with a knowledge that something this way comes, though he knows not what—

Though this childish hope hangs onto him like a vice, an infection, this idea that he actually does know. 

He wonders if he will ever stop hoping. 

X

It’s the crackle of lightning trickling over his skin that wakes him, bathed in moonlight. 

Thor calls upon the energy within, demands it to return and let him slumber. Yet it erupts from his fingertips, throwing itself upon the stump that he has stood watch over for weeks. His lightning lays itself prostrate over the many rings of the aged wood, like a man begging for all that he has lost, pleading for its return. 

Thor tastes his heart in his mouth as he lifts his gaze to the heavens. 

The white light that called him here rides upon beams of moonlight, treating them as a staircase down to earth. Slender feet form through ribbons of white, twisting into one another until a sure shape has come to fruition. 

First feet, then long legs, encased in black shiny boots, and a featureless face and torso, brilliant and bright, a walking sun. The night is forgotten and turned to day, in this place alone. 

Thor can only look on, forgetting himself entirely and crawling on his hands to kneel at the stump. 

He blinks, keeps expecting to wake, and that feeling that he must be asleep, _surely_ , only pervades as the figure steps down onto the stump, and a single eye slices itself into the figure’s face, an eye he knows well. 

Thor hears himself speaking, sobbing really, he is sobbing a single word over and over again and he reaches out, foolish, because who knows what touching this creature could do to him but there is a warm lithe hand curling around his fingers and he doesn’t _care_. 

“Brother,” he gasps. 

“Brother.”

He thinks he may shatter if he hears Loki speak aloud again. 

(How strange it is, that he should feel like this is not a reunion, as if they were never truly separated—)

All at once, the light is gone, the clearing gone back to shadows and violets, and Thor expects to see his brother gone, his moment of mercy snatched away before he could truly take it in. 

Loki still stands before him, solid, real, in dark billowing robes, and a small, unreadable smile. 

And for the first time, Thor thinks, Loki has nothing to say. Not at first- he can hear it, a faint buzz trapped in his skull, like Loki has his fingers trapped in there, tapping on bone. 

The buzz carries with it an apology, for all manner of things, for what Loki has done, for not being here sooner—

“It was a long walk down the tree to you. You understand, don’t you?”

Loki needs not open his mouth to say that. Thor hears it between his ears and for another terrible second he’s certain he’s dreaming, how else would Loki be able to speak to him like this— but then Loki is kneeling upon the stump and gathering Thor into his arms, pressing his face into the top of Thor’s head, breathing, whispering, alive. 

Thor does not know how long he lays there over this miraculous heart, weeping like a child into his brother’s chest. 

He needs every second that he takes. 

X

Thor doesn’t question him at the beginning— paranoia niggles at him, teasing him with the thought that he ought not to question a good thing. 

He instead does right by Loki, takes Stark up on his previous offer who by all means takes Loki’s reappearance well. After looking into the eyes of the creature that has invaded your resting hours and tried its damnedest to take everything from you- well, Loki must seem a simple block in the road compared to the Hel Thanos had brought with him. 

Loki doesn’t need food anymore. He doesn’t need water.

He still takes them both because- “I would be a fool if I didn’t take this second chance and make it my lot in life to try every sort of ice cream there is.”

Besides that, he is Loki, he is Thor’s brother, he is his lover, and there is nothing more to it. 

They are grateful for the simple life they take up together; they lock away from the world for a year, spend much of it sleeping, reveling in one another’s heat until it’s impossible to tell from whom the warmth came from, they are simply warm and content. 

But curiosity catches up, pinning Thor down in bed one evening, between the cool white linens painted brilliant and bright beneath the moon, pouring in past twin glass doors. 

“How did you do it?”

Loki doesn’t need to ask what ‘it’ is. He doesn’t ask Thor to clarify much these days.

They know one another’s minds, in and out, an endless hallway that they can traverse together and find answers with a single glance. 

Tossing a careless hand over his eye, Loki sighs and stretches out, the line of his back gone taut. 

“Would you believe me if I said... I don’t entirely know?” He peers at Thor from between his fingers, face lined in frustration at the very idea that he might have to admit he does not, in fact, know _everything_. “I was not thinking when I gave you my eye. I knew, through books I certainly had no business reading as a child, that there was a way to split the soul, and that I would need to give you something of mine for it to work.”

“It was an act of desperation,” Thor says, nodding. He touches Loki’s brow, above where his eyelid sinks into nothing, and smiles, despite himself. “It would seem that there is some truth to the Midgardian saying, the eyes are the windows to the soul.”

Thor watches a blade manifest in Loki’s hand, a silent threat. His smile stretches into a smirk of satisfaction. 

“I may have given you my arm, the eye just happened to be convenient,” Loki continues, managing to be casual even as he twirls the tiny knife between his fingers. “It was just a vessel. I only needed to imbue it with my essence, and leave it here with you, so that I could use it as a beacon.

“The soul cannot help but instinctively seek out its other pieces, when it is split. So, I followed where I was called, and came down to you.”

Reaching out, Thor takes his brother’s hand, the knife caught between their palms. It catches against his skin, not enough to pierce.

“Is that why I was drawn to the forest? I was drawn to you?”

Loki nods. He lets the knife go to dust between their hands, and clasps his fingers around Thor’s, squeezing tight.

“I was not done with you, brother,” he says, so quiet, Thor must lean in close to catch every word. It’s a confession that pains him still, that they need each other, and Thor understands that it must be frightening to need somebody so, so much- because he too, is afraid, but throws himself into it, lets himself love, because it is all he has, and all he could ever want now when he thought he could never have it again.

(He presses that feeling to Loki’s heart, squeezes it into his hand. Loki closes his eye, and _shivers_.)

“I … am not done with you until I have known a time of peace with you,” Loki continues, bringing their tangled hands to his cheek. “And so I admit, this was perhaps my most selfish act, especially as I didn’t know if this would work, if it would hurt you- but I suppose it is in my nature to be selfish.”

Thor raises up on all fours, throws himself astride his brother. He gazes down at this creature, this clever and selfish creature that he calls brother, that descended from Valhalla simply because he demanded more time at his side.

“I cannot fault you for this.”

He no longer needs to cover his blue eye to see the energy swirling around his brother, a constant icy fog that consumes, and wears a green sparkling sheen, ever moving, ever lively. 

Lightning falls from his wrists, and loses itself in that fog, just as Thor loses himself in his brother’s kiss, again and again and again.


End file.
